"From the age of thirteen I wandered abroad and at twenty-one I decided to take a little trip across France dressed as a man..." Maria ter Meetelen tells the story of her capture by Barbary pirates and twelve years as a slave at Meknes in Morocco. Straightforward and with no literary pretensions, her voice comes down the centuries, robust, clear, personal and often surprising: "I do not complain at having been so far across the world, nor of my twelve years of slavery, nor of the suffering the Turks caused me, I can rise above that. But the spitefulnessand derision that my husband and I suffered from our fellow-countrymen cannot be forgotten, and is impossible for me to set it down here in writing."

Introduction by: Caroline Stone